The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Infant Mortality in Brazil

picture by Blog do MÃ­lton Jung on Flickr

Adding pieces of evidence to the ROI of citizen participation. Highlights are mine:

Participatory budgeting, via which the common citizen is given the ability to interact with the elected politicians in the drafting of the local budget, became a popular political reform in Brazilian municipalities in the 1990s and attracted widespread attention across the world. This paper investigates whether the use of participatory budgeting in Brazilian municipalities in the period 1991-2004 has affected the pattern of municipal expenditures and had any measurable impact on living conditions. I show that the municipalitiesthat made use of this participatory mechanism favoured an allocation of publicexpenditures that closely matched the ìpopular preferences and channeleda larger fraction of their total budget to key investments in sanitation andhealth services. I also found that this change in the composition of municipalexpenditures is associated with a pronounced reduction in the infant mortalityrates for municipalities which adopted participatory budgeting. This suggests that promoting a more direct interaction between service users and elected officials in budgetary design and implementation can affect both how local resources are spent and associated living standard outcomes.